26 January 1984: Hello Macintosh
The ‘1984’ television advertisement announced the coming of the Apple Macintosh during the Super Bowl match in Florida on Sunday 22 January. Steve Jobs unveiled the system at the Flint Center, Cupertino two days later. And the Irish launch of the new product followed at Scruffy Murphys pub in Dublin on Thursday.
Everything that Apple Computer did in the third week of 1984 was radically different from the way that IBM had introduced its IBM Personal Computer – the world’s then-dominant desktop system – which had arrived in Ireland one year earlier.
Ridley Scott’s ‘1984’ video depicted a totalitarian world and an act of resistance that had nothing to do with desktop systems. Then Steve Jobs broke all the conventions for a computer demonstration. He inserted a floppy disk into the new Apple machine and let it introduce itself, running a series of screenshots and a text-to-speech capability straight out of science fiction. And where IBM had left non-Americans waiting for the PC for more than a year, the Macintosh would go on sale in Europe at the same time as in the US.
Apple had chosen Cork as its European manufacturing base in 1980. Three years later the factory management established a sales and distribution organisation for Ireland. By then the Apple Lisa had shown the world how a graphical user interface could transform a personal computer. The more affordable Macintosh was also on the horizon.
Apple’s previous distributor, Softech, had focused on educational users and won a government contract to supply an Apple II computer to every second-level school in the country. When the new sales subsidiary opened an office in Dublin, most of its staff were former photocopier salesmen. The new regime, led by managing director Brian Kelly, wanted to reach more business users.
In November 1983 Brian Kelly, Bob Taylor and Brendan O’Sullivan from Apple Computer Sales travelled to Hawaii for an internal Apple presentation of the Macintosh. Other attendees included Lotus Development founder Mitch Kapor, who promised that Lotus 1-2-3 would be available on the Mac, and Bill Gates who promised a Mac edition of Microsoft Word. Apple was now pressing other developers to produce more applications.
The company had little software to demonstrate, apart from its own personal productivity applications, at the official launch in January 1984. It announced, however, that over 100 software companies were preparing products.
Scruffy Murphys was near the Apple office in Mount Street Crescent. Some of the company’s press and business contacts used to drink there, so it booked the pub’s upstairs room for the launch. There was space for around 50 people, a screen on which to show the Ridley Scott advertisement and a single Macintosh computer. Brian Kelly picked it up and declared ‘Here it is’.
It was only four months since the first deliveries of the Lisa in Ireland, so the concept of the graphical user interface with a mouse to point and click was still very novel, even among the Apple resellers at the launch event. The cost of a Lisa was £8,250, while the Mac would sell for less than £2500 – relatively affordable, perhaps, but not yet priced to suit the broad masses.
Apple did not set a sales target for Brian Kelly’s team. The company promoted the new product as a computer for businesses, professional users and third level students and encouraged its dealers to find early adopters.
The first Macintosh shipments followed in April 1984. The dealers soon discovered the limitations of the first version with its 9-inch monochrome screen, 128K of RAM and floppy disks that held just 400K of data files. But demand picked up when hardware enhancements and software packages came on stream. Desktop publishing became a major application for system after Aldus Corporation introduced PageMaker in 1985.
Four decades after the launch at Scruffy Murphys Apple is continuing to expand the capabilities of the Macintosh. Users can now choose among the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iMac, Mac mini, Mac Studio and Mac Pro variants.
IBM, in contrast, sold off its PC business 20 years ago.
Dates To Remember
04 September 1998: ‘The culture was always to “think big” and go for it’
24 November 1997: Inauguration@Cork
September 1997: Online banking – Ready if you want it
September 1992: Glockenspiel falls silent
October 1991: ‘This is text messaging’
17 June 1991: ‘The internet is now available for testing’
19 March 1991: Three software developers. One desk. No chairs.
09 October 1989: E-commerce pioneers assemble
26 January 1984: Hello Macintosh
18 January 1983: ‘Your friendly IBM Personal Computer’
April 1969: 100,000 missing passengers at Dublin Airport
September 1966: Paper-based computing comes to Guinness
December 1960: The first computer installation in Dublin
23 February 1909: A proposed analytical machine
27 July 1866: ‘It is a great work a glory to our age and nation’
Brian Kelly
Apple Computer Sales
I joined Apple in June 1983. There was no European sales structure at the time and there were very few dealerships. The people who ran the factory in Cork hired me and I was initially based there. The company was still selling mainly Apple IIs and delivering machines under a schools contract. The Apple III was available but didn’t bite. Lisa had also arrived and broke the ground for the Mac. Having seen the Lisa we were already acclimatised to mouse clicks.
That summer I went to Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, met Steve Jobs and saw a Macintosh prototype with a gaping hole where the floppy disk drive was going to go. Apple was waiting to install the first 3.5 inch disks. It was a terrific piece of technology looking for a solution.
There was no real launch plan and we didn’t know when it would happen. Cork, however, was very involved in the manufacturing preparations.
When we unveiled the Macintosh in January people were wowed by it. But the big challenge for us was to show real applications on the machine. We were competing with everyone being fixated on the IBM PC and Apple products were relatively expensive. The Apple III cost about £1800 and the Mac started at £2200 to £2300.
Apple pressed developers to produce more applications. Aldus PageMaker, Adobe’s fonts technology and the first laser printers eventually brought in desktop publishing and drove the success of the Macintosh.
Brendan O’Sullivan
Apple Computer Sales
Steve Jobs had introduced the Mac by emphasising it’s ‘lift-ability’ as he removed it from the Macintosh carry case, inserted a floppy disk and let it introduce itself. When we launched the Mac in Scruffy Murphys we used a similar approach.
However it was only two days after the official launch in USA so we didn’t have the fancy demo floppy that Jobs had. Instead Brian Kelly revealed the Mac from inside the Mac carry case and I proceeded to demonstrate MacPaint and MacWrite (the only apps that worked on the Mac at intro) as the attendees thronged around the solitary Mac we had to show.
The attendees were blown away by the fact that you could ‘see’ a document on the screen and this new fangled device called a mouse allowed you to point at the document and it ‘opened’ a sheet of text that you could type on. Then you could open another document and draw pictures!! Throw in the fact that for the first time you had type that was not just one fixed text but things called typefaces plus sound and the Mac really did solicit a sense of wonder from those who were there.
Gerry Hurley
Computing Workshop
My Apple story began in 1983 at the Computex exhibition in the RDS. No Mac, but two Lisas made their debut, one at the new Apple Sales stand, and the other at Lewis Leith’s Softech … cheekily imported to show that they would not be silenced by Apple’s new corporate presence on their turf.
Computing Workshop became an Apple reseller in mid-1984. As a recent architecture graduate, my intention was to champion the Mac approach to computing to Ireland’s architecture and design practices. One of my first prospective clients, Hugh Skinner, surprised me by asking if he could join my efforts.
Soon after, Bob Taylor and Brendan O’Sullivan at Apple Sales brought us in to show us the first LaserWriter with a beta version of Aldus PageMaker. They were unsure of the prospects for such an expensive setup in the Irish market but, as designers, we knew this was truly a game-changer.
Shifting focus to sell mainly desktop publishing systems, we became aware of the scale of the Irish print and publishing industry, and we found a ready market for the camera-ready 300dpi output of the laser printer. Early sales included Irish Times, Youth Employment Agency, IDA, Bord Fáilte, CTT, Denton Print and Trinity College, and then came the explosion of interest from printers, newspapers and companies across the country.
I now live near Washington DC and work part-time at an Apple Store as a great way to keep connected to the amazing Mac user base.
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Liam O’Regan
QTH Electronics
It wasn’t hard to become an Apple dealer. QTH started with a shop on Dun Laoghaire, selling Commodore, Sinclair, Atari and Dragon computers as well. In 1983 we sold three or four of the very expensive Apple Lisas.
Because I had experience of Lisa, and because I had read so much about the Macintosh in computer magazines and trade publications, I wasn’t blown away when Apple gave me a preview. But I liked what it could do and I could see where it was going.
There was a lot of interest in the system after the launch. People just wanted to see it and we spent a lot of time showing it off. But when the first Macs were delivered, the only software available was MacWrite and MacDraw – and they were really the same application. We drew a lot of pictures and made a lot of posters, filling the QTH shop window with pages from a dot matrix printer.
The first Macintosh I sold went to the Country Cellar in Dun Laoghaire – a shop that sold home brew kits and health foods.
People could do more with the system after Microsoft released Word and the Multiplan spreadsheet. But they needed a second disk drive to make it practical. Then the Profile – Apple’s external hard disk drive – came out. The costs of disk drives and printers pushed up the price of a system.
QTH grew in the 1980s, selling home computers as well as the Macintosh. I liked the technical side of the business and spent more and more time supporting customers and fixing their systems. I kept working in that area until 2018 and made a living from the Macintosh for more than thirty years.
Apple mapped out the specifications for the first model in January 1984. Click on the image to enlarge.
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